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• New Wine in New Bottles

  - by Tony Davis

  How many people, when their car shows signs of wear and tear, would consider upgrading the engine and keeping the shell? Even if you're cash-strapped, you'll soon work out the subtlety of the economics, the cost of sudden breakdowns, the precious time lost coping with the hassle, and the low 'book value'. You'll generally buy a new car. The same philosophy should apply to database systems. Mainstream support for SQL Server 2005 ends on April 12; many DBAS, if they haven't done so already, will be considering the migration to SQL Server 2008 R2. Hopefully, that upgrade plan will include a fresh install of the operating system on brand new hardware. SQL Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are designed to work together. The improved architecture, processing power, and hyper-threading capabilities of modern processors will dramatically improve the performance of many SQL Server workloads, and allow consolidation opportunities. Of course, there will be many DBAs smiling ruefully at the suggestion of such indulgence. This is nothing like the real world, this halcyon place where hardware and software budgets are limitless, development and testing resources are plentiful, and third party vendors immediately certify their applications for the latest-and-greatest platform! As with cars, or any other technology, the justification for a complete upgrade is complex. With Servers, the extra cost at time of upgrade will generally pay you back in terms of the increased performance of your business applications, reduced maintenance costs, training costs and downtime. Also, if you plan and design carefully, it's possible to offset hardware costs with reduced SQL Server licence costs. In his forthcoming SQL Server Hardware book, Glenn Berry describes a recent case where he was able to replace 4 single-socket database servers with one two-socket server, saving about $90K in hardware costs and $350K in SQL Server license costs. Of course, there are exceptions. If you do have a stable, reliable, secure SQL Server 6.5 system that still admirably meets the needs of a specific business requirement, and has no security vulnerabilities, then by all means leave it alone. Why upgrade just for the sake of it? However, as soon as a system shows sign of being unfit for purpose, or is moving out of mainstream support, the ruthless DBA will make the strongest possible case for a belts-and-braces upgrade. We'd love to hear what you think. What does your typical upgrade path look like? What are the major obstacles? Cheers, Tony.

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• SQL Contests – Solution – Identify the Database Celebrity

  - by Pinal Dave

  Last week we were running contest Identify the Database Celebrity and we had received a fantastic response to the contest. Thank you to the kind folks at NuoDB as they had offered two USD 100 Amazon Gift Cards to the winners of the contest. We had also additional contest that users have to download and install NuoDB and identified the sample database. You can read about the contest over here. Here is the answer to the questions which we had asked earlier in the contest. Part 1: Identify Database Celebrity Personality 1 – Edgar Frank “Ted” Codd (August 19, 1923 – April 18, 2003) was an English computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases. He made other valuable contributions to computer science, but the relational model, a very influential general theory of data management, remains his most mentioned achievement. (Wki) Personality 2 – James Nicholas “Jim” Gray (born January 12, 1944; lost at sea January 28, 2007; declared deceased May 16, 2012) was an American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1998 “for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation.” (Wiki) Personality 3 – Jim Starkey (born January 6, 1949 in Illinois) is a database architect responsible for developing InterBase, the first relational database to support multi-versioning, the blob column type, type event alerts, arrays and triggers. Starkey is the founder of several companies, including the web application development and database tool company Netfrastructure and NuoDB. (Wiki) Part 2: Identify NuoDB Samples Database Names In this part of the contest one has to Download NuoDB and install the sample database Hockey. Hockey is sample database and contains few tables. Users have to install sample database and inform the name of the sample databases. Here is the valid answer. HOCKEY PLAYERS SCORING TEAM Once again, it was indeed fun to run this contest. I have received great feedback about it and lots of people wants me to run similar contest in future. I promise to run similar interesting contests in the near future. Winners Within next two days, we will let winners send emails. Winners will have to confirm their email address and NuoDB team will send them directly Amazon Cards. Once again it was indeed fun to run this contest. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Six Unusual Blogs I Like

  - by Bill Graziano

  I subscribe to and read over 100 SQL Server blogs every day.  I link to posts that I think are interesting.  I also read a fair number of non-SQL Server blogs.  Here are a few that I think are interesting. danah boyd. She is a researcher with Microsoft and writes about privacy, social media and teenagers.  I discovered her blog while looking for strategies to keep my personal and professional life separate.  (I haven’t found a good solution to that yet.)  Her stories of how teenagers use Facebook and other social media tools are fascinating. Clayton’s Web Snacks.  Steve Clayton works at Microsoft and has a variety of blogs out there.  This one focuses on … hmmm.  His latest posts are on graffiti, infographics, paper tweets, cartoons and slow motion videos.  It’s mostly visual and you never really know what you’ll get.  It’s always interesting though and I like what he posts.  It’s good creative stuff. Seth Godin.  Seth writes about Marketing.  I read him for motivation to get off my butt and get things done.  He’s a great motivator who encourages you to think big.  And do something! Ask the Pilot.  Patrick Smith is a commercial airline pilot writing about the airline industry.  He’s a great debunker of myths (no they don’t reduce oxygen in the cabin to keep you docile).  My favorite topics include the TSA, flying myths, airport reviews and flight delays. My old favorite flight blog used to be enplaned.  No one knew who wrote it.  It focused on the economics of the airline industry.  It was fascinating stuff.  One day it was gone.  The entire blog was deleted.  Someone tracked down some partial archives and put them online. The Agent’s Journal.  Jack Bechta is an NFL agent.  He writes about the business side of the NFL, the draft and free agency.  Lately he’s been writing about the potential lockout.  He has a distinct lack of hype which I find very refreshing.  xkcd.  I call this the comic for smart people.  A little math, some IT and internet privacy thrown in all make an unusual comic. Funny and intelligent.

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• The importance of Unit Testing in BI

  - by Davide Mauri

  One of the main steps in the process we internally use to develop a BI solution is the implementation of Unit Test of you BI Data. As you may already know, I’ve create a simple (for now) tool that leverages NUnit to allow us to quickly create Unit Testing without having to resort to use Visual Studio Database Professional: http://queryunit.codeplex.com/ Once you have a tool like this one, you can start also to make sure that your BI solution (DWH and CUBE) is not only structurally sound (I mean, the cube or the report gets processed correctly), but you can also check that the logical integrity of your business rules is enforced. For example let’s say that the customer tell you that they will never create an invoice for a specific product-line in 2010 since that product-line is dismissed and will never be sold again. Ok we know that this in theory is true, but a lot of this business rule effectiveness depends on the fact the people does not do a mistake while inserting new orders/invoices and the ERP used implements a check for this business logic. Unfortunately these last two hypotesis are not always true, so you may find yourself really having some invoices for a product line that doesn’t exists anymore. Maybe this kind of situation in future will be solved using Master Data Management but, meanwhile, how you can give and idea of the data quality to your customers? How can you check that logical integrity of the analytical data you produce is exactly what you expect? Well, Unit Testing of a DWH or a CUBE can be a solution. Once you have defined your test suite, by writing SQL and MDX queries that checks that your data is what you expect to be, if you use NUnit (and QueryUnit does), you can then use a tool like NUnit2Report to create a nice HTML report that can be shipped via email to give information of data quality: In addition to that, since NUnit produces an XML file as a result, you can also import it into a SQL Server Database and then monitor the quality of data over time. I’ll be speaking about this approach (and more in general about how to “engineer” a BI solution) at the next European SQL PASS Adaptive BI Best Practices http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/eu2010/Agenda/ProgramSessions/AdaptiveBIBestPratices.aspx I’ll enjoy discussing with you all about this, so see you there! And remember: “if ain't tested it's broken!” (Sorry I don’t remember how said that in first place :-)) Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Keep taking the tablets

  - by Roger Hart

  A guest editorial for the SimpleTalk newsletter. So why would Red Gate build an Ipad Game? Is it just because tablet devices are exciting and cool? Ok, maybe a little. Mostly, it was seeing that the best existing tablet and smartphone apps do simple, intuitive things, using simple intuitive interfaces to solve single problems. That's pretty close to what we call our own "intuitively simple" approach to software. Tablets and mobile could be fantastic for us, if we can identify those problems that a tablet device can solve. How do you create THE next tool for a completely new technology? We're glad we don't face that problem every day, but it's pretty exciting when we do. We figure we should learn by doing. We created "MobileFoo" (a Red Gate Company) , we picked up some shiny Apple tech, and got to grips with Objective C, and life in the App Store ecosystem. The result so far is an iPad game: Stacks and Heaps It's Rob and Marine's spin on Snakes and Ladders. Instead of snakes we have unhandled exceptions, a blue screen of death, and other hazards. We wanted something compellingly geeky on mobile, and we're pretty sure we've got it. It's trudging through App Store approval as we speak. but if you want to get an idea of what it is like to switch from .net to Objective C, take a look at Rob's post Android and iOS is quite a culture-change for Windows developers. So to give them a feel for the problems real users might have, we needed some real users - we offered our colleagues subsidised tablets. The only conditions were that they get used at work, and we get the feedback. Seeing tablets around the office is starting to give us some data points: Is typing the bottleneck? Will tablets ever cut it as text-entry devices, and could we fix it? Is mobile working held up by the pain of connecting to work LANs? How about security? Multi-tasking will let tablets do more. They're small, easy to use, almost instant to switch on, and connect by Wi Fi. There's plenty on that list to make a sysadmin twitchy. We'll find out as people spend more time working with these devices, and we'd love to hear what you think about tablet devices too. (comments are filtered, what with the spam)

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• Transparent Technology from Amazon

  - by David Dorf

  Amazon has been making some interesting moves again, this time in the augmented humanity area.  Augmented humanity is about helping humans overcome their shortcomings using technology.  Putting a powerful smartphone in your pocket helps you in many ways like navigating streets, communicating with far off friends, and accessing information.  But the interface for smartphones is somewhat limiting and unnatural, so companies have been looking for ways to make the technology more transparent and therefore easier to use. When Apple helped us drop the stylus, we took a giant leap forward in simplicity.  Using touchscreens with intuitive gestures was part of the iPhone's original appeal.  People don't want to know that technology is there -- they just want the benefits.  So what's the next leap beyond the touchscreen to make smartphones even easier to use? Two natural ways we interact with the world around us is by using sight and voice.  Google and Apple have been using both in their mobile platforms for limited uses cases.  Nobody actually wants to type a text message, so why not just speak it?  Any if you want more information about a book, why not just snap a picture of the cover?  That's much more accurate than trying to key the title and/or author. So what's Amazon been doing?  First, Amazon released a new iPhone app called Flow that allows iPhone users to see information about products in context.  Yes, its an augmented reality app that uses the phone's camera to view products, and overlays data about the products on the screen.  For the most part it requires the barcode to be visible to correctly identify the product, but I believe it can also recognize certain logos as well.  Download the app and try it out but don't expect perfection.  Its good enough to demonstrate the concept, but its far from accurate enough.  (MobileBeat did a pretty good review.)  Extrapolate to the future and we might just have a heads-up display in our eyeglasses. The second interesting area is voice response, for which Siri is getting lots of attention.  Amazon may have purchased a voice recognition company called Yap, although the deal is not confirmed.  But it would make perfect sense, especially with the Kindle Fire in Amazon's lineup. I believe over the next 3-5 years the way in which we interact with smartphones will mature, and they will become more transparent yet more important to our daily lives.  This will, of course, impact the way we shop, making information more readily accessible than it already is.  Amazon seems to be positioning itself to be at the forefront of this trend, so we should be watching them carefully.

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• Silverlight Cream for November 22, 2011 -- #1172

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: XAMLGeek, WindowsPhoneGeek, Nigel Sampson, Jesse Liberty, Sumit Dutta(-2-), Dave Bost, Jared Bienz, Joost van Schaik, and Michael Crump. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "10 Laps around Silverlight 5 (Part 7 of 10)" Michael Crump WP7: "Using MVVMLight, ItemsControl, Blend and behaviors to make a ‘heads up compass’" Joost van Schaik Metro/WinRT/W8: "“Badevand” for Windows 8" XAMLGeek Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert Mountain Developers is up Michael Washington's latest Visual Studio #LightSwitch Daily is up From SilverlightCream.com:“Badevand” for Windows 8XAMLGeek posted a Metro app that shows water and air temperature and rain level for 5 beaches in Copenhagen, Denmark... no source, but good to see people posting appsGetting Started with Windows Phone RemindersWindowsPhoneGeek digs into Reminders in this WP7.1 post... the code you need, description, and a project to downloadHelp my app has been revoked!Nigel Sampson had a surprise when his latest app was revoked on his device, and then another... read what the solution wasA Dozen Windows Phone Videos… And CountingJesse Liberty posted his 12th WP7.1 video on Channel 9 - all about Reminders in MangoPart 23 - Windows Phone 7 - Detect Operator and Network InformationSumit Dutta has 2 more parts to his WP7 quest up... this part 23 is about getting mobile operator information and hot to get network capabilities using Microsoft.Phone.Net.DeviceNetworkInformationPart 24 - Windows Phone 7 - Microphone RepeaterIn part 24, Sumit Dutta uses the Microsoft.Xna.Framework Microphone class to record and play back voice.31 Days of Mango | Day #13: Marketplace Test KitDave Bost is at the helm of Jeff Blankenburg's Day 13 in his 31 day quest, discussing the Marketplace Test Kit and showing how to use it to determine if your app is ready for certification31 Days of Mango | Day #12; Beta DistributionJeff Blankenburg's Day 12 is written by guest author Jared Bienz, and shows how to submit an application for Beta testingUsing MVVMLight, ItemsControl, Blend and behaviors to make a ‘heads up compass’Joost van Schaik has a tutorial up showing how to make a WP7 Compass app using MVVMLight, Expression Blend, and then shows his thoughts on using the ItemsControl and Behaviors... code, descriptions and a project to download.... and I think I got your name right for the first time, Joost :)10 Laps around Silverlight 5 (Part 7 of 10)Michael Crump put out part 7 of his Silverlight 5 series at SilverlightShow... this is actually part 2 of OS Integration with Silverlight covering, among other things, 64-bit browser support and Power AwarenessStay in the 'Light!Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCreamJoin me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User GroupTechnorati Tags:Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows PhoneMIX10

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• Please help me give this principle a name

  - by Brent Arias

  As a designer, I like providing interfaces that cater to a power/simplicity balance. For example, I think the LINQ designers followed that principle because they offered both dot-notation and query-notation. The first is more powerful, but the second is easier to read and follow. If you disagree with my assessment of LINQ, please try to see my point anyway; LINQ was just an example, my post is not about LINQ. I call this principle "dial-able power". But I'd like to know what other people call it. Certainly some will say "KISS" is the common term. But I see KISS as a superset, or a "consumerism" practice. Using LINQ as my example again, in my view, a team of programmers who always try to use query notation over dot-notation are practicing KISS. Thus the LINQ designers practiced "dial-able power", whereas the LINQ consumers practice KISS. The two make beautiful music together. I'll give another example. Imagine a C# logging tool that has two signatures allowing two uses: void Write(string message); void Write(Func<string> messageCallback); The purpose of the two signatures is to fulfill these needs: //Every-day "simple" usage, nothing special. myLogger.Write("Something Happened" + error.ToString() ); //This is performance critical, do not call ToString() if logging is //disabled. myLogger.Write( () => { "Something Happened" + error.ToString() }); Having these overloads represents "dial-able power," because the consumer has the choice of a simple interface or a powerful interface. A KISS-loving consumer will use the simpler signature most of the time, and will allow the "busy" looking signature when the power is needed. This also helps self-documentation, because usage of the powerful signature tells the reader that the code is performance critical. If the logger had only the powerful signature, then there would be no "dial-able power." So this comes full-circle. I'm happy to keep my own "dial-able power" coinage if none yet exists, but I can't help think I'm missing an obvious designation for this practice. p.s. Another example that is related, but is not the same as "dial-able power", is Scott Meyer's principle "make interfaces easy to use correctly, and hard to use incorrectly."

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• Overload Avoidance

  - by mikef

  A little under a year ago, Matt Simmons wrote a rather reflective article about his terrifying brush with stress-induced ill health. SysAdmins and DBAs have always been prime victims of work-related stress, but I wonder if that predilection is perhaps getting worse, despite the best efforts of Matt and his trusty side-kick, HR. The constant pressure from share-holders and CFOs to 'streamline' the workforce is partially to blame, but the more recent culprit is technology itself. I can't deny that the rise of technologies like virtualization, PowerCLI, PowerShell, and a host of others has been a tremendous boon. As a result, individual IT professionals are now able to handle more and more tasks and manage increasingly large and complex environments. But, without a doubt, this is a two-edged sword; The reward for competence is invariably more work. Unfortunately, SysAdmins play such a pivotal role in modern business that it's easy to see how they can very quickly become swamped in conflicting demands coming from different directions. However, that doesn't justify the ridiculous hours many are asked (or volunteer) to devote to their work. Admirably though their commitment is, it isn't healthy for them, it sets a dangerous expectation, and eventually something will snap. There are times when everyone needs to step up to the plate outside of 'normal' work hours, but that time isn't all the time. Naturally, with all that lovely technology, you can automate more and more of those tricky tasks to keep on top of the workload, but you are still only human. Clever though you may be, there is a very real limit to how far technology can take you. I'm not suggesting that you avoid these technologies, or deliberately aim for mediocrity; I'm just saying that you need to be more than just technically skilled (and Wesley Nonapeptide riffs on and around this topic in his excellent 'Telepathic Robot Drones' blog post). You need to be able to manage expectations, not just Exchange. Specifically, that means your own expectations of what you are capable of, because those come before everyone else's. After all, how can you keep your work-life balance under control, if you're the one setting the bar way too high? Talking to your manager, or discussing issues with your users, is only going to be productive if you have some facts to work with. "Know Thyself" is the first law of managing work overload, and this is obviously a skill which people develop over time; the fact that veteran Sysadmins exist at all is testament to this. I'd just love to know how you get to that point. Personally, I'm using RescueTime to keep myself honest, but I'm open to recommendations for better methods. Do you track your own time, do you have an intuitive sense of what is possible, or do you just rely on someone else to handle that all for you? Cheers, Michael

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• What do you do when you encounter an idiotic interview question?

  - by Senthil

  I was interviewing with a "too proud of my java skills"-looking person. He asked me "What is your knowledge on Java IO classes.. say.. hash maps?" He asked me to write a piece of java code on paper - instantiate a class and call one of the instance's methods. When I was done, he said my program wouldn't run. After 5 minutes of serious thinking, I gave up and asked why. He said I didn't write a main function so it wouldn't run. ON PAPER. [I am too furious to continue with the stupidity...] Believe me it wasn't trick questions or a psychic or anger management evaluation thing. I can tell from his face, he was proud of these questions. That "developer" was supposed to "judge" the candidates. I can think of several things: Hit him with a chair (which I so desperately wanted to) and walk out. Simply walk out. Ridicule him saying he didn't make sense. Politely let him know that he didn't make sense and go on to try and answer the questions. Don't tell him anything, but simply go on to try and answer the questions. So far, I have tried just 4 and 5. It hasn't helped. Unfortunately many candidates seem to do the same and remain polite but this lets these kind of "developers" just keep ascending up the corporate ladder, gradually getting the capacity to pi** off more and more people. How do you handle these interviewers without bursting your veins? What is the proper way to handle this, yet maintain your reputation if other potential employers were to ever get to know what happened here? Is there anything you can do or should you even try to fix this? P.S. Let me admit that my anger has been amplified many times by the facts: He was smiling like you wouldn't believe. I got so many (20 or so) calls from that company the day before, asking me to come to the interview, that I couldn't do any work that day. I wasted a paid day off.

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• links for 2011-01-06

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Coming to your town: Oracle Enterprise Cloud Summit During these full-day events, cloud experts will share real-world best practices, reference architectures, detailed customer case studies, and more. Events scheduled in cities around the world.  (tags: oracle otn cloud event) Webcast: Security and Compliance for Private Cloud Consolidation Roxana Bradescu, Senior Director for Oracle Database Security Products, discusses Oracle Database Security Solutions to securely consolidate data and meet compliance requirements within private cloud computing environments. Thursday, January 13, 2011. 10am PST | 1pm EST (tags: oracle cloud security) Answering Questions about Mobile Devices | The AppsLab "How do the numbers of Android and iOS users compare? How often are people switching? Where are all these BlackBerry and Nokia users? Do they plan to jump to Android or iOS? What about webOS? Is it relevant?" Some answers in this AppsLab survey. (tags: oracle otn enterprise2.0 mobilecomputing iphone blackberry android) Webcast: Achieve 24/7 Cloud Availability Without Expensive Redundancy Ashish Ray and Matthew Baier discuss Oracle’s Maximum Availability Architecture and Oracle Database 11g. (tags: oracle cloud highavailability webcast) Converting a PV vm back into an HVM vm (Wim Coekaerts Blog) "I wanted to convert one of my VMs that was based on a paravirt kernel into a vm that just boots as a regular hardware virt VM with a standard x86-64 kernel...It took me a little while to figure out the fastest way so now that I have it pretty much down I wanted to share the steps." - Wim Coekaerts (tags: oracle otn virtualization oraclevm) @OTN_Garage: Resources for VirtualBox 4.0 Rick "@OTN_Garage" Ramsey shares links to several resources for those with a VirtualBox jones. (tags: oracle otn virtualization virtualbox) 'Federal Service Bus' Helps Belgian Government Speak a Common Language - SOA in Action Blog "The first SOA-enabled application was developed in less than two months and was fully operational in approximately 10 weeks. In addition, new FSB modules are reusable for other Belgian e-government applications, saving both time and taxpayer dollars." - Joe McKendrick (tags: soa oracle) Show Notes: Architects in the Cloud (ArchBeat Podcast) The complete 4-part interview with Stephen G. Bennett and Archie Reed, the authors of "Silver Clouds, Dark Linings: A Concise Guide to Cloud Computing," is now available. (tags: oracle otn cloud podcast archbeat)

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• MIX 2010 Covert Operations Day 1

  - by GeekAgilistMercenary

  Portland Departure - Farewell Stumptown Off I go on a plane from Portland, Oregon to Las Vegas, Nevada for the MIX 2010 Conference.  Before I even boarded the plane I met Paul Gomes a Senior Software Engineer and Andrew Saylor the Director of Business Development.  Both of these SoftSource Employees were en route to MIX themselves.  Being stoked to already be bumping into some top tier people, I bid them adieu and headed for my seat on the plane. I boarded, and had before the boarding opted for an upgrade.  I have to advise that if you get a chance on Alaska to upgrade at the last minute, take it.  It is usually only about $50 bucks or so and the additional space makes working on the ole' laptop actually possible (even on my monstrous 17" laptop).  So take it from me, click that upgrade button and fork over that $50 bucks for anything over an hour flight, the comfort and ability to work is usually worth it! Las Vegas Arrival - Welcome to Sin City Got into Las Vegas and swung out of the airport.  I then, with my comrade Beth attempted to get Internet Access for the next 3 hours.  Las Vegas, is not the most friendly Internet Access town.  I will just say it, I am not sure why any Internet related company (ala Microsoft) would hold a conference here.  There are more than a dozen other cities that would be better. But I digress, I did manage to get Internet Access after checking into the Circus Circus.  Don't ask why I ended up staying here, if you run into me in person, ask then because there is a whole story to it. At this point I started checking out each session further on the MIX10 Site.  There are a number I deemed necessary to check out.  However, you'll have to read my pending entries to see which session I jumped into. With this juncture in time reached, I got a ton of work to wrap up, some code to write and some sleep to get.  Until tomorrow, adieu. For more of my writing, thoughts, and other topics check out my other blog, where the original entry is posted.

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• How to Use Your Android Phone as a Modem; No Rooting Required

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  If your cellular provider’s mobile hotspot/tethering plans are too pricey, skip them and tether your phone to your computer without inflating your monthly bill. Read on to see how you can score free mobile internet. We recently received a letter from a How-To Geek reader, requesting help linking their Android phone to their laptop to avoid the highway robbery their cellular provider was insisting upon: Dear How-To Geek, I recently found out that my cellphone company charges $30 a month to use your smartphone as a data modem. That’s an outrageous price when I already pay an extra $15 a month charge just because they insist that because I have a smartphone I need a data plan because I’ll be using so much more data than other users. They expect me to pay what amounts to a $45 a month premium just to do some occasional surfing and email checking from the comfort of my laptop instead of the much smaller smartphone screen! Surely there is a work around? I’m running Windows 7 on my laptop and I have an Android phone running Android OS 2.2. Help! Sincerely, No Double Dipping! Well Double Dipping, this is a sentiment we can strongly related to as many of us on staff are in a similar situation. It’s absurd that so many companies charge you to use the data connection on the phone you’re already paying for. There is no difference in bandwidth usage if you stream Pandora to your phone or to your laptop, for example. Fortunately we have a solution for you. It’s not free-as-in-beer but it only costs $16 which, over the first year of use alone, will save you $344. Let’s get started! Latest Features How-To Geek ETC What Can Super Mario Teach Us About Graphics Technology? Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is Released: But Should You Install It? How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way) How To Remove People and Objects From Photographs In Photoshop Make Efficient Use of Tab Bar Space by Customizing Tab Width in Firefox See the Geeky Work Done Behind the Scenes to Add Sounds to Movies [Video] Use a Crayon to Enhance Engraved Lettering on Electronics Adult Swim Brings Their Programming Lineup to iOS Devices Feel the Chill of the South Atlantic with the Antarctica Theme for Windows 7 Seas0nPass Now Offers Untethered Apple TV Jailbreaking

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• Creating the Completely Customized World Just for YOU

  - by divya.malik

  OK so not a customized world, but do you know what goes into creating that customized web store front for you? How do you get those additional offers from vendors when you call in for service or when you are browsing a storefront. This is what is has been happening behind the scenes.  When a customer calls in a contact center for service, at the end of the conversation, they are offered a new product, or service. But what just transpired was that the CRM system that was in place had routed the call to the right agent, the agent got the pop up screen with the customer information, and the call request  was handled. Then came the decision point to cross-sell and up-sell, The agent got some recommended offers that were created based on analyzed data (this data had been put into a data warehouse, modeled, profiled and rules were implemented e.g.. People with profile X like product Y).  But with this system, what happens is that analytics can be applied to a very small subset. Now comes Real Time Decisioning (RTD), this helps companies make optimal decisions in the context of transactional systems. It enables companies to improve business processes with real time intelligence on every single transaction. RTD is like a service plug-in that you put at the back of your transactional systems and that you  ping to get a recommendation.  It listens to business process flows and data moving through the process, getting all that data, processes all that you can do with that data, and gives out out various offers. It takes a process centric view of analytics rather than just a data centric view. It continuously observes and learns from ever-changing customer behavior and applies those insights to providing real-time decisions and recommendations at any customer touch point. At Oracle we define Real Time Decisioning as “ The solution that addresses a business issue faced by all organizations : how to make accurate decisions, using the most up to date information, in real time…consistently and in large volumes”. Here is a video on recommendation engines that are benefiting from real time decisioning today and see how it is helping online vendors.

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• Adding a Role to a Responsibility for Use with the Oracle E-Business Suite SDK for Java JAAS Implementation

  - by Juan Camilo Ruiz

  This new post on the series of ADF integration with Oracle E-Business Suite, was written by Sara Woodhull, Principal Product Manager on the Oracle E-Business Suite Applications Technology team. Based on a previous post of the series, a reader asked what to do if you have an existing responsibility assigned to lots of users, instead of the UMX role that the Oracle E-Business Suite SDK for Java JAAS Implementation requires.  It would be tedious to assign a new role directly to hundreds or thousands of users, so naturally we’d like to avoid that if possible. Most people don’t know this, but it’s possible to assign a UMX role to a responsibility in Oracle User Management. Once you do that, users with your responsibility will all inherit your UMX role automatically. You can then proceed with using your UMX role with JAAS for ADF. Here is how to assign a UMX role to a responsibility in Oracle E-Business Suite: In the User Management responsibility, go to the Roles & Role Inheritance page. Search for the responsibility you want. In the search results table, click the “View In Hierarchy” icon for your responsibility. Note that the codes for responsibilities start with FND_RESP, while the codes for roles start with UMX. In the Role Inheritance Hierarchy, click on the Add Node icon (green plus + ) for your responsibility. Now you will see what appears to be the same page again but it is a little different (note the text at the top telling you the role you select will be inherited…).  This time, either search or expand nodes until you find your custom UMX role.  Use the Quick Select to choose that role. You will be sent back to the first screen, where you should see a confirmation message at the top. On the same page you can verify that the custom UMX role is underneath the responsibility.  You may need to expand one or more nodes to see the UMX role under the responsibility. You might see some other roles that have been inherited as well. Now that your users have the UMX role, you can test that the UMX role is being passed through to your ADF application through the Oracle E-Business Suite SDK for Java JAAS feature. Happy coding!

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• TechEd 2010 Day Three: The Database Designer (Isn't)

  - by BuckWoody

  Yesterday at TechEd 2010 here in New Orleans I worked the front-booth, answering general SQL Server questions for the masses. I was actually a little surprised to find most of the questions I got were from folks that wanted to know more about Stream Insight and Master Data Services. In past conferences I've been asked a lot of "free consulting" questions, about problems folks have had from older products. I don't mind that a bit - in fact, I'm always happy to help in any way I can. But this time people are really interested in the new features in the product, and I like that they are thinking ahead, not just having to solve problems in production. My presentation was on "Database Design in an Hour". We had the usual fun, and SideShow Bob made an appearance - I kid you not. The guy in the back of the room looked just like Sideshow Bob, so I quickly held a "bes thair" contest, and he won. Duing the presentation, I explain the tools you can use to design databases. I also explain that the "Database Designer" tool in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) isn't truly a desinger - it uses non-standard notation, doesn't have a meta-data dictionary, and worst of all, it works at the physical level. In other words, whatever you do in SSMS will automatically change the field/table/relationship structures in the database. We fixed this in SSMS 2008 and higher by adding an option to block that, but the tool is not a good design function nonetheless. To be fair, no one I know of at Microsoft recommends that it is - but I was shocked to hear so many developers in the room defending it as a good tool. I think the main issue for someone who doesn't have to work with Relational Systems a great deal is that it can be difficult to figure out Foreign Keys. The syntax makes them look "backwards", so it's just easier to grab a field and place it on the table you want to point to. There are options. You can download a couple of free tools (CA has a community edition of ER-WIN, Quest has one, and Embarcadero also has one) and if you design more than one or two databases a year, it may be worth buying a true design tool. For years I used Visio, but we changed it so that it doesn't forward-engineer (create the DDL) any more, so it isn't a true design tool either. So investigate those free and not-so-free tools. You'll find they help you in your job - but stay away from the Database Designer in SSMS. Or I'll send Sideshow Bob over there to straighten you out. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• JCP EC Nomination Materials for 2012

  - by heathervc

  The nomination period of the 2012 Annual JCP EC Elections will begin at the end of September 2012.  The JCP will be accept self-nominations for 2 seats on what will become the merged JCP EC, starting 28 September, with the nomination period ending on Thursday, 11 October. JCP Members (JSPA 2 primary contacts) will receive messages with instructions for nominating and their login credentials via email.  You will need this credential information to login and complete the nomination.The JCP EC Special Election schedule is posted online in the JCP calendar, highlights are below:Nominations for elected seats: 28 September-11 OctoberBallot (ratified and elected): 16-29 OctoberNew members take office: 13 November The ballot with nominees for ratified and nominated seats begins on 16 October. The results will also be available on jcp.org on 30 October. If you are attending JavaOne 2012 in San Francisco, there are several events happening that you may be interested in attending, in particular the following BOF session.Meet the JCP Executive Committee CandidatesSession ID: BOF6307Location: Hilton San Francisco - Golden Gate 3/4/5Date and Time: 10/2/12, 4:30 PM - 5:15 PM We will also be hosting a call for all of the candidates following the nomination period.  The following information is required for self-nomination.1) Contact information/Biography Each EC seat is represented by two people - a primary and alternate representative. Provide the following information for each representative: - Name - Title - Email Address - Mailing Address - Phone Number - Fax - A brief biography (3-5 sentences/~100-200 words) for primary contact - Photograph (prefer jpg format, head only shot) for primary contactBios and photos for the EC members are posted here:http://jcp.org/en/press/news/ec-feature_MEhttp://jcp.org/en/press/news/ec-feature_SE2) Qualification StatementA brief (2-3 paragraph) description of your qualifications for an EC seat; this is a Qualification Statement for the organization you represent. It should include the value and perspective you bring to the EC, your interests in the JCP program, as well as a summary of your current participation or planned participation in the JCP program (your entire organization)--JSRs, participation on Expert Groups, meetings/events attended, etc.  This statement will appear on the ballot and will convince community members that they should vote for you, so please include relevant information about your experience within the JCP program and your investments in Java technology.A few sample qualification statements are available here.3) Position PaperOne of the pieces of information we make available to the JCP membership for voting purposes is a position paper.  If you would like to provide this type of information for the ballot, please prepare in pdf format for posting.  This would be more detail on areas that you would put focus into during your tenure on the JCP EC.You can read more about some of the topics under discussion in the EC here, including links to JCP.Next materials. If you have an interest in participating in the JCP EC, please start preparing these materials now.  We look forward to a successful election process.

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• Clone an Azure VM using Powershell

  - by jamiet

  In a few months time I will, in association with Technitrain, be running a training course entitled Introduction to SQL Server Data Tools. I am currently working on putting together some hands-on lab material for the course delegates and have decided that in order to save time in asking people to install software during the course I am simply going to prepare a virtual machine (VM) containing all the software and lab material for each delegate to use. Given that I am an MSDN subscriber it makes sense to use Windows Azure to host those VMs given that it will be close to, if not completely, free to do so. What I don’t want to do however is separately build a VM for each delegate, I would much rather build one VM and clone it for each delegate. I’ve spent a bit of time figuring out how to do this using Powershell and in this blog post I am sharing a script that will: Prompt for some information (Azure credentials, Azure subscription name, VM name, username & password, etc…) Create a VM on Azure using that information Prompt you to sysprep the VM and image it (this part can’t be done with Powershell so has to be done manually, a link to instructions is provided in the script output) Create three new VMs based on the image Remove those three VMs Simply download the script and execute it within Powershell, assuming you have an Azure account it should take about 20minutes to execute (spinning up VMs and shutting the down isn’t instantaneous). If you experience any issues please do let me know. There are additional notes below. Hope this is useful! @Jamiet  Notes: Obviously there isn’t a lot of point in creating some new VMs and then instantly deleting them. However, this demo script does provide everything you need should you want to do any of these operations in isolation. The names of the three VMs that get created will be suffixed with 001, 002, 003 but you can edit the script to call them whatever you like. The script doesn’t totally clean up after itself. If you specify a service name & storage account name that don’t already exist then it will create them however it won’t remove them when everything is complete. The created image file will also not be deleted. Removing these items can be done by visiting http://manage.windowsazure.com. When creating the image, ensure you use the correct name (the script output tells you what name to use): Here are some screenshots taken from running the script: When the third and final VM gets removed you are asked to confirm via this dialog: Select ‘Yes’

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• Multiple render targets and gamma correctness in Direct3D9

  - by Mario

  Let's say in a deferred renderer when building your G-Buffer you're going to render texture color, normals, depth and whatever else to your multiple render targets at once. Now if you want to have a gamma-correct rendering pipeline and you use regular sRGB textures as well as rendertargets, you'll need to apply some conversions along the way, because your filtering, sampling and calculations should happen in linear space, not sRGB space. Of course, you could store linear color in your textures and rendertargets, but this might very well introduce bad precision and banding issues. Reading from sRGB textures is easy: just set SRGBTexture = true; in your texture sampler in your HLSL effect code and the hardware does the conversion sRGB-linear for you. Writing to an sRGB rendertarget is theoretically easy, too: just set SRGBWriteEnable = true; in your effect pass in HLSL and your linear colors will be converted to sRGB space automatically. But how does this work with multiple rendertargets? I only want to do these corrections to the color textures and rendertarget, not to the normals, depth, specularity or whatever else I'll be rendering to my G-Buffer. Ok, so I just don't apply SRGBTexture = true; to my non-color textures, but when using SRGBWriteEnable = true; I'll do a gamma correction to all the values I write out to my rendertargets, no matter what I actually store there. I found some info on gamma over at Microsoft: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb173460%28v=vs.85%29.aspx For hardware that supports Multiple Render Targets (Direct3D 9) or Multiple-element Textures (Direct3D 9), only the first render target or element is written. If I understand correctly, SRGBWriteEnable should only be applied to the first rendertarget, but according to my tests it doesn't and is used for all rendertargets instead. Now the only alternative seems to be to handle these corrections manually in my shader and only correct the actual color output, but I'm not totally sure, that this'll not have any negative impact on color correctness. E.g. if the GPU does any blending or filtering or multisampling after the Linear-sRGB conversion... Do I even need gamma correction in this case, if I'm just writing texture color without lighting to my rendertarget? As far as I know, I DO need it because of the texture filtering and mip sampling happening in sRGB space instead, if I don't correct for it. Anyway, it'd be interesting to hear other people's solutions or thoughts about this.

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• TDC: The Developer's Conference Day One

  - by Tori Wieldt

  The Developer's Conference (TDC) kicked off Wednesday in São Paulo, Brazil. With over 3000 developers in attendance over five days, it is the premier multi-community developer conference in Brazil, organized by Globalcode. Yara Senger, one of the organizers said, "We like to say multi-community rather than multi-technology because it is interesting and benefical when various communities get together. They learn so much from each other!" TDC includes tracks on Java and several other technologies, including SOA, Python, Ruby, mobile and digital TV. In the mobile track, developers who create a Java ME app will get a Nokia S40 phone!New this year at TDC is the Java University track, sponsored by Oracle.  It is aimed at university students and professionals who are new to Java. The lectures are introductory level, with an educational focus and practical exercises. The Java track and other tracks, such as SOA, mobile and Digital TV, are getting lots of help from the expertise of Brazilian JUGS members. Thanks to GoJava, JavaBahia, JavaNoroeste and SouJava!Carlos Fernando, one of the coordinators on the Digital TV track, said "My goal is to teach developers the basics of digital TV, and show them the tools used to build interactive TV applications." Fernando explained the concept of "the second screen:" that many people watch TV and have second smart device (tablet or smartphone) with them, and this creates many opportunities for developers. For example, while watching TV, a viewer can get extra content (interviews, behind the scenes) on their tablet. More interestingly, while watching their favorite TV show a viewer likes an outfit one of the actors is wearing, their smartphone can tell them where they can buy it nearby, or they can order it online immediately. Fernando exclaimed, "The opportunities for developers are nearly infinite in the area of digital TV!" At the TDC opening keynote, Debora Palermo, Oracle University country manager for Brazil, reminded attendees that Java is present in many devices, from simple to complex, and knowledge of this platform can open many doors in the labor market. She explained Oracle's Workforce Development Program (WDP), managed by Oracle University, which allows educational institutions to deliver Oracle training. WDP allows for easy and low-cost access to Oracle training in local communities across the world. "Oracle University is committed to creating the next generation of Java developers, and WDP can make that happen," Palermo said. As of March 2012, Oracle University is partnering with Globalcode to offer WDP. Students can earn official Oracle Course Certifications, a great way to learn Java.Brazilian developers that cannot attend TDC can watch live streaming.

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• Rant on EDI

  - by Anthony Trudeau

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tonyt/archive/2013/06/27/153261.aspxMy post this month is a rant and not something informational. I hope y'all will forgive me.It's been a slow month. I was on vacation with my daughter for the middle part of the month. And the rest of my time has been preparing for a major ERP upgrade, and dealing with a last minute surprise from a customer that has EDI changes.The subject of EDI is my rant. I was tossed into EDI years ago by the same customer. I understood the basic concepts, but not details -- implementation or otherwise. I started with my network including a couple of people with EDI experience. And for one that was all she did. She was my first taste of what seems to be a protected group.I started looking for the standards with a budget in mind, or rather a lack of budget. See whenever someone stone walls you like that it tells me that what they're doing isn't as mystical as they'd like you to believe. Real magic doesn't need to be kept secret. And that is the case with EDI; however, the EDI industry tries to protect it. You cannot even download the standards. They cost thousands of dollars.All this does is ensure that they continue to rack up consulting dollars from their ignorant clients. Well sirs and madams, I put my finger in your eye. I developed my own translator. And while it's not robust enough to resell due to the limited scope of information I could gather. It did save my employer tens if not over a hundred thousand dollars.My public service message, therefore is as follows. Don't be afraid to tackle implementing EDI if you're even a semi-competent developer. You need some experience parsing, familiarity with your business system, and a little patience. Also, pick your VAN well. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that the biggest names are the best choice. That was a costly mistake for us that we are stuck with for a couple more years.

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• TDD vs. Productivity

  - by Nairou

  In my current project (a game, in C++), I decided that I would use Test Driven Development 100% during development. In terms of code quality, this has been great. My code has never been so well designed or so bug-free. I don't cringe when viewing code I wrote a year ago at the start of the project, and I have gained a much better sense for how to structure things, not only to be more easily testable, but to be simpler to implement and use. However... it has been a year since I started the project. Granted, I can only work on it in my spare time, but TDD is still slowing me down considerably compared to what I'm used to. I read that the slower development speed gets better over time, and I definitely do think up tests a lot more easily than I used to, but I've been at it for a year now and I'm still working at a snail's pace. Each time I think about the next step that needs work, I have to stop every time and think about how I would write a test for it, to allow me to write the actual code. I'll sometimes get stuck for hours, knowing exactly what code I want to write, but not knowing how to break it down finely enough to fully cover it with tests. Other times, I'll quickly think up a dozen tests, and spend an hour writing tests to cover a tiny piece of real code that would have otherwise taken a few minutes to write. Or, after finishing the 50th test to cover a particular entity in the game and all aspects of it's creation and usage, I look at my to-do list and see the next entity to be coded, and cringe in horror at the thought of writing another 50 similar tests to get it implemented. It's gotten to the point that, looking over the progress of the last year, I'm considering abandoning TDD for the sake of "getting the damn project finished". However, giving up the code quality that came with it is not something I'm looking forward to. I'm afraid that if I stop writing tests, then I'll slip out of the habit of making the code so modular and testable. Am I perhaps doing something wrong to still be so slow at this? Are there alternatives that speed up productivity without completely losing the benefits? TAD? Less test coverage? How do other people survive TDD without killing all productivity and motivation?

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• Best practices for logging and tracing in .NET

  - by Levidad

  I've been reading a lot about tracing and logging, trying to find some golden rule for best practices in the matter, but there isn't any. People say that good programmers produce good tracing, but put it that way and it has to come from experience. I've also read similar questions in here and through the internet and they are not really the same thing I am asking or do not have a satisfying answer, maybe because the questions lack some detail. So, folks say that tracing should sort of replicate the experience of debugging the application in cases where you can't attach a debugger. It should provide enough context so that you can see which path is taken at each control point in the application. Going deeper, you can even distinguish between tracing and event logging, in that "event logging is different from tracing in that it captures major states rather than detailed flow of control". Now, say I want to do my tracing and logging using only the standard .NET classes, those in the System.Diagnostics namespace. I figured that the TraceSource class is better for the job than the static Trace class, because I want to differentiate among the trace levels and using the TraceSource class I can pass in a parameter informing the event type, while using the Trace class I must use Trace.WriteLineIf and then verify things like SourceSwitch.TraceInformation and SourceSwitch.TraceErrors, and it doesn't even have properties like TraceVerbose or TraceStart. With all that in mind, would you consider a good practice to do as follows: Trace a "Start" event when begining a method, which should represent a single logical operation or a pipeline, along with a string representation of the parameter values passed in to the method. Trace an "Information" event when inserting an item into the database. Trace an "Information" event when taking one path or another in an important if/else statement. Trace a "Critical" or "Error" in a catch block depending on weather this is a recoverable error. Trace a "Stop" event when finishing the execution of the method. And also, please clarify when best to trace Verbose and Warning event types. If you have examples of code with nice trace/logging and are willing to share, that would be excelent. Note: I've found some good information here, but still not what I am looking for: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ff714589.aspx Thanks in advance!

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• SQL SERVER – Concurrancy Problems and their Relationship with Isolation Level

  - by pinaldave

  Concurrency is simply put capability of the machine to support two or more transactions working with the same data at the same time. This usually comes up with data is being modified, as during the retrieval of the data this is not the issue. Most of the concurrency problems can be avoided by SQL Locks. There are four types of concurrency problems visible in the normal programming. 1)      Lost Update – This problem occurs when there are two transactions involved and both are unaware of each other. The transaction which occurs later overwrites the transactions created by the earlier update. 2)      Dirty Reads – This problem occurs when a transactions selects data that isn’t committed by another transaction leading to read the data which may not exists when transactions are over. Example: Transaction 1 changes the row. Transaction 2 changes the row. Transaction 1 rolls back the changes. Transaction 2 has selected the row which does not exist. 3)      Nonrepeatable Reads – This problem occurs when two SELECT statements of the same data results in different values because another transactions has updated the data between the two SELECT statements. Example: Transaction 1 selects a row, which is later on updated by Transaction 2. When Transaction A later on selects the row it gets different value. 4)      Phantom Reads – This problem occurs when UPDATE/DELETE is happening on one set of data and INSERT/UPDATE is happening on the same set of data leading inconsistent data in earlier transaction when both the transactions are over. Example: Transaction 1 is deleting 10 rows which are marked as deleting rows, during the same time Transaction 2 inserts row marked as deleted. When Transaction 1 is done deleting rows, there will be still rows marked to be deleted. When two or more transactions are updating the data, concurrency is the biggest issue. I commonly see people toying around with isolation level or locking hints (e.g. NOLOCK) etc, which can very well compromise your data integrity leading to much larger issue in future. Here is the quick mapping of the isolation level with concurrency problems: Isolation Dirty Reads Lost Update Nonrepeatable Reads Phantom Reads Read Uncommitted Yes Yes Yes Yes Read Committed No Yes Yes Yes Repeatable Read No No No Yes Snapshot No No No No Serializable No No No No I hope this 400 word small article gives some quick understanding on concurrency issues and their relation to isolation level. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Get to Know a Candidate (12 of 25): Andre Barnett&ndash;Reform Party

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting. Information sourced for Wikipedia. Barnett is an American politician and entrepreneur. He is the founder of the information technology (IT) company WiseDome Inc.  Barnett was born in Zanesville, Ohio in 1976. He attended Austin Peay State University and Western Governors University.  A former member of the United States Armed Forces, Barnett served in Sarajevo before being wounded in a helicopter accident.  Following his military service, Barnett became a fitness model in New York. In 2001, he founded WiseDome Incorporated, an IT company that provides information technology and data recovery services. Reform Party of the United States of America (RPUSA), generally known as the Reform Party USA or the Reform Party, is a political party in the United States, founded in 1995 by Ross Perot. Perot said Americans were disillusioned with the state of politics—as being corrupt and unable to deal with vital issues—and desired a viable alternative to the Republican and Democratic Parties. The party has nominated different candidates over the years, such as founder Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, and Ralph Nader. The party's most significant victory came when Jesse Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota in 1998. Since then, the party has been torn by infighting and disagreements, which it seeks to overcome. The Reform Party platform includes the following: * Maintaining a balanced budget, ensured by passing a Balanced Budget Amendment and changing budgeting practices, and paying down the federal debt * Campaign finance reform, including strict limits on campaign contributions and the outlawing of the Political action committee * Enforcement of existing immigration laws and opposition to illegal immigration * Opposition to free trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement and Central America Free Trade Agreement, and a call for withdrawal from the World Trade Organization * Term limits on U.S. Representatives and Senators * Direct election of the United States President by popular vote * Federal elections held on weekends A noticeable absence from the Reform Party platform has been social issues, including abortion and gay rights. Reform Party representatives had long stated beliefs that their party could bring together people from both sides of these issues, which they consider divisive, to address what they considered to be more vital concerns as expressed in their platform. The idea was to form a large coalition of moderates; that intention was overridden in 2001 by the Buchanan takeover which rewrote the RPUSA Constitution to specifically include platform planks opposed to any form of abortion. The Buchananists, in turn, were overridden by the 2002 Convention which specifically reverted the Constitution to its 1996 version and the party's original stated goals. Barnett has Ballot Access in: FL Learn more about Andre Barnett and Reform Party on Wikipedia.

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